[Richard]

Al Qaeda Wasn’t ‘on the Run’
WeeklyStandard, 15 Sep 2014
Part 2 of 3

The CIA provided access on a read-only basis, but even that limited look into bin Laden’s world made clear to the military analysts that the Obama administration’s public story on al Qaeda reflected the president’s aspirations more than reality.

The narrative heading into the 2012 presidential election was simple. “Al Qaeda is on the path to defeat,” Obama said repeatedly. And “Al Qaeda has been decimated.” And “Al Qaeda is on the run.” And “We have gone after the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11 and decimated al Qaeda.” And “Al Qaeda is on its heels.”

There was some truth to the claims. Drone strikes on al Qaeda senior leadership in Pakistan had eliminated several of the group’s top leaders, and the resulting turnover created uncertainty in its senior ranks. And Obama was well within his rights to boast about the killing of Osama bin Laden.

But the administration chose to portray these short-term tactical successes as long-term strategic victories. The official spin required a static analysis of al Qaeda and its leadership, an assumption that al Qaeda wouldn’t adequately replace fallen leaders or adjust its strategy to counter U.S. moves.

The weeks before the administration marked the one-year anniversary of the bin Laden raid featured several leaks about al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and the documents captured in Abbottabad, all designed to show that the group was reeling in the face of the tough counterterrorism measures of the Obama administration.

On March 18, 2012, Washington Post writer David Ignatius’s column appeared under the headline: “Osama bin Laden, a lion in winter.” Ignatius, a conscientious writer, conceded the limits of his knowledge. “I’ve only seen a small sample of the thousands of items that were carried away the night of May 2, 2011,” he wrote. “But even those few documents shown to me by a senior Obama administration official give a sense of how bin Laden looked at the world in the years before his death.” Bin Laden, wrote Ignatius, “sensed that the movement itself had lost its momentum.” He and his associates “were hunted so relentlessly by U.S. forces that they had trouble sending the simplest communications.” Ignatius cited a 48-page memo from bin Laden to a top deputy that communicated the leader’s concerns.

The next day, Peter Bergen, a CNN national security analyst, reported on the documents. “Bin Laden wrote a 48-page memo to a deputy in October 2010 that surveyed the state of his organization,” wrote Bergen. The U.S. efforts to root out al Qaeda had been too successful and bin Laden had grown despondent. (Three months later, Bergen would write something of a follow-up: “Time to Declare Victory: al Qaeda Is Defeated.”)

Not surprisingly, that memo was one of a small batch of documents the Obama administration had approved for declassification and release on the one-year anniversary of the bin Laden raid.

Three weeks before the anniversary, the administration provided that handpicked set of documents to analysts at the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point. The CTC team, according to two sources familiar with the events, was instructed to prepare a study to accompany the release of the documents around the upcoming anniversary.

To some involved in the CTC study, it was clear that the report was to be part of a broader administration public relations effort. But others assumed good faith on the part of the administration. “They didn’t pressure us on timing at all,” says Lieutenant Colonel Liam Collins, at the time the director of the center.

The administration originally approved 19 documents for declassification and release. But shortly after providing them to the CTC, Lieutenant General Doug Lute, a senior official on the National Security Council, called to ask that one of the documents be withheld. The document in question detailed the close relations between al Qaeda and senior leaders of the Afghan Taliban. Lute explained that the administration had restarted secret negotiations with the Taliban, and releasing the document could present unwanted complications. The document was not released.

The White House may have been spooked by a report from Jason Burke in the Guardian on April 29, just days before the scheduled release of the declassified materials. “Documents found in the house where Osama bin Laden was killed a year ago show a close working relationship between top al Qaeda leaders and Mullah Omar, the overall commander of the Taliban, including frequent discussions of joint operations against NATO forces in Afghanistan, the Afghan government and targets in Pakistan.”

Burke continued: “The news will undermine hopes of a negotiated peace in Afghanistan, where the key debate among analysts and policymakers is whether the Taliban—seen by many as following an Afghan national agenda—might once again offer a safe haven to al Qaeda or like-minded militants, or whether they can be persuaded to renounce terrorism.” Burke tells The Weekly Standard that he doesn’t know if he was shown the documents as part of a broader rollout.

On April 30, John Brennan, then Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser and now his CIA director, made a striking claim: The elimination of al Qaeda was imminent. “If the decade before 9/11 was the time of al-Qaeda’s rise, and the decade after 9/11 was the time of its decline, then I believe this decade will be the one that sees its demise,” he told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. Then Brennan previewed the release of the bin Laden documents:

With its most skilled and experienced commanders being lost so quickly, al Qaeda has had trouble replacing them. This is one of the many conclusions we have been able to draw from documents seized at bin Laden’s compound, some of which will be published online, for the first time, this week by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. For example, bin Laden worried about—and I quote—“the rise of lower leaders who are not as experienced and this would lead to the repeat of mistakes.”

Al Qaeda leaders continue to struggle to communicate with subordinates and affiliates. Under intense pressure in the tribal regions of Pakistan, they have fewer places to train and groom the next generation of operatives. They’re struggling to attract new recruits. Morale is low, with intelligence indicating that some members are giving up and returning home, no doubt aware that this is a fight they will never win. In short, al Qaeda is losing, badly.

Others echoed Brennan’s claims. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta declared that the United States was “within reach of strategically defeating al Qaeda,” and President Obama, in remarks the day after Brennan’s speech, boasted, “The goal that I set—to defeat al Qaeda and deny it a chance to rebuild—is now within our reach.”

The CTC report was released on May 3 under the title “Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Laden Sidelined?” The authors were careful to note that they were given just a fraction of the document collection and that researchers there had “no part in the selection of documents.” The conclusions of the study were consistent with the administration’s line: Al Qaeda had been badly weakened, and in the months before his death Osama bin Laden had been marginalized.

As the public heard this carefully managed story about al Qaeda, analysts at CENTCOM were poring over documents that showed something close to the opposite.

(Cont'd)